Mailbox Monday, April 15, 2013

Just one book this past week. Something a little out of my comfort zone, but it sounded intriguing when I spotted it on Shelf Awareness.

After Visiting Friends: A Son’s Storyby Michael Hainey

Michael Hainey had just turned six when his uncle knocked on his family’s back door early one morning with tragic news: Bob Hainey, Michael’s father, had been found dead in the night, alone on a dark Chicago street. The cause of death, a heart attack. Thirty-five years old, Bob was a bright and shining star in the hard-living brotherhood of the 1960s big-city newspapers, where booze-soaked nights bled into dawn. And then suddenly he was gone, leaving behind a young widow, two sons, a fractured family, and questions about the mysteries of his death that would obsess Michael long into adulthood.

Man years later, and now a seasoned reporter himself, Michael finally summons the courage to search out the truth of what happened that night – no matter the toll on his family. At the heart of his riveting quest is Michael’s mother, a woman of great courage and tenacity – and a steely determination not to look back. Prodding his relatives and tracking down a network of his father’s colleagues who abide by an honor code of silence, Michael sees beyond the long-held myths and ultimately reconciles the father he had imagined with the man that he comes to discover. Perhaps most powerfully of all, his decade-long journey leads him to a moving rediscovery of his mother.

After Visiting Friends is a heartrending and beautifully written memoir of a family’s legacy of secrets, a universal story about how we find ourselves.